Q Clearance

  Furthermore, a POTUS line violated Burnham's instinct for self-preservation. It permitted no time for a calculated response, for the creation of excuses and evasions. It forced spontaneity and candor—bad news for a person interested in survival.

  Burnham wanted as many baffles as possible between himself and the Oval Office. When he first arrived at the White House, he had longed for proximity, had striven always to be accessible to the President. Though a day's work was done, he would linger in his office into the evening, until he could ascertain that the President had left the Oval Office for the mansion. And even then he would call the White House switchboard and tell the operators exactly where he was going and when he would arrive.

  Just in case.

  By now he knew that the only good news from the President was no news. If the President wanted to deliver a compliment, he sent it through Warner Cobb. If he wanted to see someone not on the POTUS network, he would have the individual summoned by Evelyn Witt or the secretary to the Appointments Secretary. Only if he was incensed or flustered or unable at that precise moment to reach a particular high-level aide would he directly contact a middle-echelon esne like Burnham.

  It had happened to Burnham once, by accident. He had stayed late at the office because he had a date to meet Sarah at 7:45 at a theater a few blocks farther downtown. His secretary, Dyanna Butler (who came from Richmond, where, apparently, exotic spelling of first names was mandatory), had long since left for her apartment across the river in Arlington, so he was alone with Walter Jackson Bate's biography of Samuel Johnson when the phone rang.

  He picked it up and, because he detested the military habit of answering with his last name, said simply, "Hello."

  A voice thundered, "You a writer?"

  In the next few seconds, Burnham recognized the voice, assumed that he was wrong, wondered whether it was a joke or an impersonation, decided that it wasn't, and concluded that, in fact, he was being telephoned by the President of the United States. Who was waiting for a reply. From him.

  "Sir?"

  "I said, are you a goddamn writer?"

  "Ah . . . well ..."

  "Judas Priest! Goddamn Cobb has taken a powder and now I can't find anybody speaks English." (Warner Cobb had left the building to attend a retirement dinner for a State Department official, one of the many details relevant to this phone call which Burnham would learn over the next twenty-four hours and a fact that the President could have discovered by calling the switchboard instead of impulsively using the POTUS system, giving up and shouting at an operator, "Get me a writer!" The operators knew that Burnham was the only writer still in the building.)

  "Yessir. A writer."

  The President seemed to take a deep breath, for when he spoke again, his voice was calm, controlled. "I thought we had a deal, son."

  "Sir?" He doesn't even know who I am, Burnham thought.

  "I thought we agreed that you fellas were going to help out your President ..."

  "Yes, sir . . ."

  "... by phoneticizing names that no goddamn human being in the civilized world can be expected to pronounce right."

  A clue. Something had gone wrong with a speech, a name had been mispronounced. But which name? Burnham didn't know all the speeches the President gave. Only Cobb knew the entire list.

  "Yes, sir. We phoneticize them all."

  "You do, eh?" The voice was rising again, rearing back like the fat lady gearing up for the last aria of the opera. "How about . . . Kat-Man-Fucking-Du?"

  Oh, shit. It was his speech. Last night. A short, inconsequential toast to the Prime Minister of Nepal. He had spoken to Cobb about Katmandu. It was a rule that all foreign names were to be phoneticized for the President, no matter how simple or familiar. Sha-MEER; Gor-ba-CHOV. The problem with Katmandu was that it was phonetic as is. For the sake of the gesture, in the text he had spelled it Kat-man-DOO.

  "Yes, sir. Katmandu."

  "You know where Katmandu is, son?"

  "Yes, sir, I do."

  "Do you suppose it would be fair of the President to ask you to share that knowledge with him?"

  "Sir?"

  "I'm gonna tell you something that I would tell Cobb if he wasn't out tomcatting when he should be at his desk working like the taxpayers pay him to do. I want all you goddamn writers to stop jerking off . . ."

  "What?" What's he talking about? Burnham waited, and the President continued.

  "... with chicken-shit names like Katmandu . . . and . . . the rest."

  Now the silence was of a broken connection. Burnham stared at the telephone receiver, as if willing it to surrender more information, not realizing that he had been given a substantial clue.

  The next day Burnham and Cobb together reconstructed the few minutes that preceded the phone call. The President had been walking from his office back to the mansion when he had spotted a copy of the "Style" section of the Post lying open on a table. He stopped and turned the pages till he found the gossip column, the Disposall of Washington tripe that always gave him a lash to use against some member of his staff. There was nothing of interest until the last item,

  White House Coup

  The President tried to score points with another Third-Worid nation last night, but as usual, to use one of his own favorite phrases, he just "slobbered abibful."

  At a small dinner for the Prime Minister of the Himalayan nation of Nepal, the President praised the Prime Minister, the King and the country, citing contributions made to the worid community—and then proceeded to pronounce the name of the country "Nipple."

  Some pacifier.

  The Secret Service man with the President told Cobb that the President had dropped the paper "like it was covered with maggots" and had lurched so spastically toward die nearest phone that he feared the President might have had a stroke.

  BuRNHAM'S secretary, Dyanna Butler, was thirty years old and single, which meant that at the core of all her moods were confusion and a sense of betrayal, anger and feelings of resentment. Everything in her upbringing had conditioned her to believe that it was impossible to be thirty years old and single; the two states could not exist together; they were contradictory. She was from a "good" Virginia family, in which care in breeding and documentable height of family tree were acceptable substitutes for wealth and talent. She had gone to Foxcroft and Sweetbriar, had been presented to society (a second mortgage on the family home. Fox Knoll, had seen to all three), had impeccable taste in clothes, was a creditable cook (people praised her gazpacho and salmon mousse), held a relatively prestigious (for a young woman) government job and was good-looking in a clean, Olivia Newton-John way.

  Try though she often did, she couldn't figure out what had gone wrong. Granted, she worked in a town where single women outnumbered single men by two or more to one. But she had beaten worse odds than those in college; she had been a standout. "Always remember, Honey," her father had told her, "wherever you sit, that's the head of the table."

  Burnham could have given her a couple of pointers, from the perspective of a disinterested older observer, had she sought his counsel, but she wasn't about to confess that any cog in her transmission had slipped, and he wasn't about to involve himself in anything that would complicate his existence.

  One simile that had crossed Burnham's mind about Dyanna was that she made Narcissus look like Mother Teresa. Her nails were honed and tempered Toledo blades; the several elements of her eyes were plucked, highlighted and outlined as if they were to be presented to a sheik on a plate; her hair was washed, set, combed and, finally, sprayed into Carrara permanence. She was a Barbie-Doll pieta.

  As a conversationalist, she was an enraptured listener and a fascinating raconteuse, as long as the subject was herself. When the subject of the conversation wasn't herself, she attacked and wrestled with it until it became herself.

  Too cruel, Burnham admitted. Dyanna was amiable and often thoughtful, and she did protect him, however much to protect him was also in her interest. She knew a lot
about the federal government and the people in it. She was a superb typist, a mistress of the IBM Correcting Selectric III as Casals was a master of the cello. She was polite on the telephone, didn't spend all her time yakking with friends and didn't (so far as he knew) gossip about him, not that there was much to gossip about.

  Because Dyanna was incapable of assigning blame for any part of her dilemma to any flaw in herself, she decided that the reason she hadn't met Mr. Right was that she didn't move in the right circles—meaning the circles traveled by men who were bright, sophisticated, wise and wealthy enough to appreciate her manifold assets. And the reason she didn't move in the right circles was that fate had cursed her with a succession of second-rank bosses.

  The acquisition of Top Secret clearance had not, as she had assumed it would, been her passport to glamour and romance. Her first job had been in the typing pool, where she worked nights tapping out routine messages to Congress. Then she was promoted to the office whence emanated routine presidential correspondence, where she typed letters that were sent out over a presidential signature inscribed by a mechanical pen, form letters that responded to comments from citizens, special blessings to couples celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversaries, and, in one instance that cost her boss an official reprimand, a message congratulating a rabbi on his fifty years of Christian endeavor.

  Her next job had been as one of two secretaries to a special assistant to the Vice-President, which meant that at least she was in daily contact with other living human beings, although most of the contact consisted of placing phone calls to people in Louisiana who treated her like a hooker.

  And now she worked for Timothy Burnham—definitely better than the Vice-President's office, but still not in the White House itself, which was where she longed to be. She knew she couldn't reasonably aspire to work for the President directly—each of his secretaries had been handpicked from a retinue of long-time retainers—and she was smart enough not to want to work for the President: The men who went in to see the President were so intense, so distracted, so nervous or so exalted (kings, for example) that they wouldn't conceivably notice a pretty young thing, no matter how striking she might be.

  Her ideal was to work for someone like Mario Epstein— surrounded by a large staff of eligible men on the way up; visited by figures of renown and power in and out of government, people who would appreciate a secretary putting them through before someone else; with instant access to, and constant contact with, the President.

  At this rate, though, Dyanna would be fifty before she reached the level of secretary to an Epstein. So she had reluctantly hitched her star to Burnham's and was forever urging him to reach higher, to volunteer to write the most difficult messages to Congress, which would mean weeks of late-night involvement with Epstein's staff, to write memos to the President suggesting ingenious ways to attract public support for favorite programs, to have confidential lunches with media biggies and submit perceptive reports to the Oval Office.

  These suggestions she made in the name of the common weal, and Burnham would nod solemnly and take notes, which he would tear off the pad and stuff in his pocket, since

  he didn't want her to discover that his notes were line-drawing speculations about how she would look in a series of sexual contortions with a variety of land mammals.

  This morning, as usual, Dyanna sat at her desk with a mug of coffee, a manicure set and the society pages of the Post spread before her. She looked up, startled, as Burnham flung the office door open, popped quickly inside, shut it behind him and stood, panting, against the wall.

  "Good morning?" she said.

  "No, no it isn't," Burnham replied. "Have you got a needle and thread?"

  "Why?"

  "Because I have had a small misfortune." He turned his back and pointed at his trousers. "I would show you the extent of the damage, but I fear that the sight of an expanse of boxer shorts would throw you into a fever. Do you ..."

  "I remember once, it was prom night, senior year, and I had this brand-new dress on, a copy of a Galanos I think it was, Mama said I looked so pretty she couldn't remember when, and I was reaching up to do something to my hair, it had just been styled and all, and ..."

  Burnham walked through the door into his office, letting her yammer on. There would be no stopping her; her monologues had the momentum of a locomotive. He checked Ijjs desk for phone messages (there were none), for mail (none) and for work. His IN box was a teak rectangle to which was affixed a pewter plaque inscribed with Burnham's favorite quote from Dr. Johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever' wrote, except for money." A gift from Sarah in the days before she had been infected by principle.

  The shallowness of the stack of papers in the IN box told Burnham that his workload was light—a couple of personal letters for the President, a proclamation for something like National Self-Abuse Prevention Week, and one or two 200-word addresses that might be delivered, or might be released as if they had been delivered, to groups from the districts of some congressmen to whom the President owed a favor. ("Representative Whipple has told me a great deal about the fine work you ladies are doing in the Leesburg Macrame and Dialysis Society. As you know, Dick Whipple is one of my closest friends and most trusted advisors, an American who . . .")

  He could knock off the whole day's work by noon, which meant that he could safely leave the building for lunch. Maybe if, as seemed likely, the workloads of McGregor and Butterworth, Burnham's two good friends among the other writers, were as light as his, they might conspire to discover the President's schedule for the rest of the afternoon, and if the coast was clear they might abandon ship for a Lucullan two- or three-hour curative lunch, which itself would call for the cure of a two-hour nap.

  Perhaps the day could be rescued, after all.

  ". . . no time at all for a proper sewing job," Dyanna droned on, "so Mama jig-timed it upstairs and found some safety pins, can you believe it, and pinned me from the inside out, and not a soul ever knew. Not even Trevor, he was my date, and we were not exactly strangers if you get my meaning, even though nothing ever really happened.''

  Burnham waited a beat or two, to make sure Dyanna hadn't stopped only to get a fresh breath, then said, "Do you have a needle and thread?"

  "What for?" Dyanna arose from her desk and stood in the doorway.

  "I told you." Burnham gestured at his trousers.

  "That's not my job."

  "What's not your job? To get me a needle?"

  "I don't have to sew anything."

  "I'm not asking you to . . ."

  "I don't even have to get you coffee. It's only the goodness of my heart."

  "Don't sew."

  "I could file a grievance."

  "I don't want you to sew."

  "You don't?"

  "I'll do it. Can you just get me a needle?"

  "Do you know how to sew?"

  "Spare me your sexist drivel and get me a needle."

  Caught, Dyanna blushed, turned to her desk and rooted through the drawers.

  Burnham pulled off his trousers and sat behind his desk and spread the split seat of the seersucker pants across the blotter. It was agape from the base of the fly to the belt loops. The seam had a little flap inside it. Where did that go, inside or outside? Did you sew from the inside out or the outside in? How close together should the stitches be?

  Dyanna returned with a needle and a spool of dark-blue thread, and not until she placed the needle and thread in Burnham's hand did she realize the implication of the pants on the desk. If the pants were on the desk, what was on him? Another fuchsia flush started at her neck and crept quickly up to her cheeks.

  "I know what you're thinking," Burnham said.

  "You do not." Now the blush was making her temples tingle.

  "What color are the shorts? Are there garters or knee socks? Knobby knees? Milky white thighs?"

  "You're sick!"

  Burnham tried twice to thread the needle and missed both times.

  "Her
e." Dyanna took the needle and thread from him, threaded the needle, turned the thread, bit off the end and tied it, and handed it back.

  "Thanks." Burnham pinched the two sides of the seam together and, from beneath, plunged the needle up through the fabric.

  "That's not the way to do it."

  "That's the way I do it."

  "It's not the right way."

  "Hey." Bumham looked up at her. "I don't think this is a team sport. Either I'll do it or you can do it."

  "It's not my job," Dyanna said weakly, torn between the opposing forces of her femininity.

  Burnham took another stitch. The phone rang. Dyanna didn't budge. It rang again.

  Burnham looked at the phone. "Is that your job, or do I have to hire a specialist?"

  "Oh," Dyanna said, as if coming to. "Oh." She reached across the desk and punched the blinking light button and picked up the receiver. "Mr. Burnham's office."

  Like a dog sensing something preternatural, Burnham felt a galvanic crackle coming from Dyanna, and he knew there was trouble. He looked at her and saw her mouth hanging half open and her fist clenching the phone. His mind galloped among the possibilities. One of his children had been injured.

  Sarah had been in a car accident. His mother had been assaulted in the Ritz Carlton in Boston. War.

  "Yessir," Dyanna said. "Yessir." She hung up.

  Burnham stared at her, holding his breath.

  “The President wants to see you."

  Burnham sighed. And chuckled. No war. No kidnapping. No maiming. "Sure." He held up his pants. "Thoughtless bitch always calls at the worst times."

  "He does!" Dyanna was stunned.

  No, Burnham thought. No. She's serious. "What about?"

  "He ... Mr. Cobb . . . didn't say."

  "When?"

  "Now. Right now!"

  "I can't! I don't have any pants!"

  "What do you mean? You have to!"

  "Like this?" Burnham jumped up, knocking his swivel chair spinning behind him, and waved a hand at his plaid boxer shorts, at his pasty white thighs marred by tiny bruises from the allergy shots he poked into himself four times every week, at his hairless, wrinkled knees and at the navy blue cotton socks that came up just beneath them. "You're not allowed to see the President of the United States without pants on. It's . . . it's illegal!"